“Their film is still pretty erratic,” I say to the head of product management of Polaroid — not knowing who they were yet staying resound in my unshakable confidence on the statement. Yet despite this and complaints from friends at my yoga studio who said that the film took a while to fully develop, I’ve never seen people literally do a dance of excitement while shaking a Polaroid picture in their hands. The last time I tested the Polaroid i2, there were guaranteed smiles on peoples’ faces. And the Polaroid Flip, with its design reminiscent of something you’d see out of the Jetsons, did the same thing. This camera reaches into the feels as deeply as retro compact cameras do — but it leaves you with the tactile material that we’re all so deeply missing.
Editor’s Note: Polaroid invited the Phoblographer and other journalists, photographers, and influencers (ew) to a meeting in Brooklyn, NY. They provided us with coffee and a loaner unit along with film. The Phoblographer paid for all other expenses. This is important as it is in regard to our stance on journalistic integrity.
The Polaroid Flip is a camera that the company created to be an intersection between art and science. At the same time, they want the product to be taken much more seriously. Where the Polaroid i2 incorporated LiDAR autofocus, the company reached back into their history and brought back Sonar autofocus — an autofocus technology that makes photography insanely inclusive. Most modern cameras have terrible autofocus on people of color in low light — even photographers at the Polaroid event where we saw the Flip agreed with us on that. Some cameras have really improved on this, but Sonar truly makes it a whole different kind of camera.
The Polaroid Flip’s autofocus system works similarly to a bat’s echolocation. It travels through the air until it comes into contact with a subject. Then, it relays that information back to the camera. The Sonar pulse emitter is located right below the viewfinder, so you basically just have to center your subject in the frame, lightly press the button to focus, and then fully press it to shoot. This process won’t be as intuitive to someone who’s never done this as I found in my tests with friends, but the learning curve isn’t steep.
Polaroid also states that it won’t have issues in clubs and loud areas because of the frequency of the sound.
For all the money that the likes of Canon, Sony and Nikon have, I’m shocked that they never wanted to put Sonar tech into their cameras as it would’ve made the autofocus system so much better. Leave it to the progressive Europeans to do it instead! For all the praises I sing of it though, Sonar is the newest and baddest gangster on the block until it runs into glass. To shoot through glass, you’d need to switch to the Bluetooth app and set the distance manually.
You aren’t supposed to see the Polaroid Flip as just a party camera — it’s a companion camera. To that end, Polaroid’s Graham Merrifield tells us that the cameras he’s used at weddings before have survived spills from folks at weddings and such. But Polaroid doesn’t say that the camera is weather resistant in any way. Considering that it’s only $200, I’d be shocked if it was.
The outside of the camera looks like something retro-futuristic. To activate the Polaroid Flip, you simply just flip up the top section. The back has an LCD screen that then displays important info. Pressing the mode button sets the camera to delay shutter shooting. Holding it down and then pressing the button lets you set the exposure compensation — and more can be done through the Bluetooth connected app. Double tapping the mode button gets you into the multiple exposure mode.
To fire the camera you press the red button around the lens area. As you focus the camera, you’ll hear it switch out to one of four lenses designed for different distances. To clarify this statement more, these “lenses” are pretty much just single optical elements. Polaroid says that this is to give the images a sharper look. But truthfully, considering the quality of their film and how erratic it can be, I don’t think that anyone is going to be striving for sharpness. In fact, the images that they have on the table during the press briefing in NYC had people of color. The images were just as soft as any Polaroid would ever be.
The camera unit itself has an f9 to f64 setting with 1/200th being the max shutter speed. That shutter speed can be slowed down to much more.
Considering the trends these days, I don’t anyone wants sharper images of themselves.
To be very frank, I like Fujifilm Instax so much more because the image quality actually reminds me of Polaroids from when I was super young. The modern Polaroid emulsion is still based off of the work that the Impossible Project did to re-engineer it. Of course, that all depends on what camera you’re using too. If you were to just scan in the image area, you’d probably never be able to tell the difference unless you were shooting with a higher end Instax product like the NONS Hasselback. Where you surely can tell the difference is in the colors and the way that they’re rendered — but unless you’re trained to do so the way I am, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Not to mention that Polaroid i-Type film, which the Polaroid Flip uses, is quite pricey. But you’re also not going to be shooting tons of it.
While I like looking at Instax film more, there’s something to be said about the rest of the experience. I constantly complain about how photography doesn’t engage the rest of the senses anymore. And with that said, I like holding the Polaroid prints a whole lot more. They’re square, big, and you can’t really go wrong with how they’re shot. Instax Square kind of does that, but it isn’t the same at all. It’s a much smaller format that reminds me a bit more of the 6×6 format though sometimes a bit smaller depending on what device you’re using.
We’re giving the Polaroid Flip four out of five stars. In the way that 2025’s cameras have been going, this is an innovative breath of fresh air even if it’s heavily borrowing from the long gone past. But most importantly, we’re awarding the Polaroid Flip the Phoblographer’s Inclusivity Award for the use of Sonar to autofocus on people of color in low light.
